SanDisk bringing music to memory cards

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Even though the online digital music market has really taken off in recent years, that doesn’t mean the music industry aren’t still looking to alternatives to help replace the falling demand for music on CD.{ad}

The latest idea to come to fruition is music on memory cards and is being spearheaded by SanDisk in what they are calling, “an innovative, new physical music format” called slotMusic.

A slotMusic purchase will consist of a 1GB MicroSD card containing DRM-free music in 320Kbps MP3 format. The additional storage available can also be used by the artists to provide more content including album art, line notes, song lyrics, promotional videos and any other content you care to think of that relates to the musician or publisher. You can also add content to the cards yourself.

SanDisk has announced all four major music labels including EMI, Sony BMG, Universal Music and Warner Music are on board and that we can expect to see slotMusic appearing at retail outlets for this holiday season.

Matthew’s Opinion
It will be interesting to see how these sell when they first come out. On the one hand it’s still nice to actually purchase something physical with your music on, but then the convenience of digital downloads is now a big draw; especially since DRM has disappeared.

The extra content may be a big draw for music fans, but the price will also be a factor and I can’t imagine they will be as cheap as a CD or digital purchase. For one, the publishers will want to make extra money from the additional content you are getting, plus I suspect producing a MicroSD card costs more than a CD. Correct me if I’m wrong?

I get the feeling this will just be a transitional media for music. It’s less wasteful than CDs because you can reuse the media they are supplied on, but 1GB is a paltry amount of storage nowadays and no one is going to be prepared to carry hundreds of these things around when they can transfer them all on to a single hard drive or digital music player.